48 Hours of Snowy, Gritty, Grueling Rally Racing

First run 40 years ago, Michigan's Sno*Drift Rally is the greatest race you're never heard of—two days of kidney-jarring driving along 130 miles of roads in a godforsaken tundra, you know, just for the hell of it.

8 Hours of Snowy, Gritty, Grueling Rally Racing

8 Hours of Snowy, Gritty, Grueling Rally Racing

At first blush, rally racing—or, simply, rally—is a pretty innocuous pastime. You buy a car. You install a roll cage and safety equipment, including a fire suit and a helmet. You find a friend to ride shotgun and navigate. You drive off into the woods—and then things get exceptionally weird.

Races start in the morning and last well into the night. They are staged in asphalt-melting heat or face-freezing cold. Lasting two or more days, they require driving flat-out on unfamiliar roads—many of them unpaved and rutted—guided only by your reflexes and the shouted instructions of a co-driver. Wrecks are common and can be severe: Roadside hazards include 100-foot drop-offs, Airstream-size boulders, and stout hardwoods. The course, more than 100 miles long, is completed at highway-travel speeds. If you are slow, you lose. If you kill your car and don't make it home, you lose. And if you don't have fun, you miss the point.

Now take all of this mayhem and stick it in a deep freeze in Atlanta, Mich., 25 miles northeast of nowhere. This is the location of the Sno*Drift Rally, held for two days almost every January since 1973. Entrants range from six-figure Subarus and Mitsubishis to $500 hoopties held together with duct tape and Bondo.

At the 2012 event we were delighted to witness a gritty, snow-covered cross between a motorsport circus and nonstop spectator party. We took particular interest in Matt Conte, 25, an engineer for Boeing, and his co-driver, Ron Erickson, 24, a software developer for Maritz. They competed in a 1994 ­Subaru Legacy that they bought for a song on Craigslist
and got race-ready with their considerable mechanical skill. The car was capable, but the driving was still harrowing. "It's like ice skating in bowling shoes, except you're wrapping out third gear in the middle of the forest, just begging for enough grip to make it around the next turn," Erickson says.

Matt Conte and his 1994 Subaru Legacy, in one of the weekend's quieter moments. The driving takes a lot out of you. "I was expecting nice powder snow that would be fun to slide around on—not 2 inches of solid polished ice that made it a chore to stay on the road," Conte says.